I've edited this post extensively over the past few hours. If you've read it before 07:10 GMT, much has been added. Sorry!Tempest wrote:Coupons: That was one hell of a post but I have to point something out. We're in a medieval time frame, as I understand it, so the idea of publishing anything, at all, in any sort of quantity is not possible. Let alone magazines with their glossy covers and photos.
I could see maybe having a list of items and all that but no one is going to read something like that except maybe the Church so they figure out if you've been sinning or not.
Oh, and reporters didn't exist, at all.
Thanks for the compliment! To clear up the idea of the magazine and the reporter, magazines actually did originate in the late middle ages, but they weren't exactly made for a wide audience. Some of the very first magazines were targeted at the wives and daughters of the wealthy merchant class, or bourgeoisie. These circulations were handwritten, with the highly infrequent appearance of illustrations, and contained fashion advice, gossip, social and political news, and were the origin of the kind of paperback romance story that is so common in bookstores today. Business news was another common subject of magazines, or "gazzettes," as they would have been called. Most of these would have been circulated by mail, but some were even hand-delivered by the writers, which was used as an opportunity to gather gossip for the next issue. Admittedly, this is more 16th century than 14th, but I thought it wouldn't be
too much of a stretch, and it allowed me to convey both historical background for the family and personal feelings of the character in an easy format.
I struggled with finding a source for the 16th century origin for a while, aside from what's in one of my history books, but finally found one online(fucking shit fuck I can't post links - Google "International History of Journalism Mitchell Stephens." It should be the first result.): "Indeed, this is a word that turns up over and over again throughout the history of the newspaper. Russians actually call their newspapers "gazeta." The word can be traced back to handwritten newssheets – sometimes known as gazzette – distributed weekly, as I have shown in my book A History of News, in Venice as early as 1566." The "gazzette" of 1566 are the earliest confirmed circulars/magazines of this nature, and they covered a variety of topics, but it's thought that they weren't the only of their kind, or even the first. There's more information in the book itself, and it's quoted quite a bit in Kishlansky's "Civilization in the West, Volume 2."
I have jumped the gun by a little more than a century, but I figure that the idea of the magazine would have cropped up shortly after the gentry did, which has a 15th century origin, I believe, and used that as an excuse to accelerate the timeline a bit. I admit that I just made the assumption of gentry and city politics, considering the sizes of some of the locations. London didn't reach a population of 200,000 until the turn of the 17th century; In the 14th century, the suggested time period for our setting, London consisted of between 20,000-50,000 citizens. The rise of the gentry allowed for new advances in farming which, in turn, allowed for the rise in population. One could not exist without the other.
Paris had a population similar to Sundregn at the end of the 14th century, sure, but there were a lot of contributing factors to this that could not exist on an island nation like Penumbria--namely religious pilgrimages that would become permanent immigration, due to the religious and cultural influence of Louis IX, the last of the Capetian line of kings, and the construction of La Sainte-Chapelle; it was widely held to be a golden age for France. These numbers would be lost by the end of the 14th century, due to the Black Death.
As a side note, none of Penumbria's cities are built on a river, like nearly every large city would have been during the time period, and this would have contributed heavily to the potential population of the city. A good example for a city that wasn't built on a river would be Rome, which had a million people at its peak, largely due to massive territorial claims and the infrastructure to bring in food from them. Unfortunately, at the time our setting, Rome had lost much of its population, and didn't recover to 200,000 citizens until the 19th century.
Anyway, I hope that helps validate my post, and has been informative for the players. In the end, this is an RP for the Isle of Penumbria, not the Isle of Britannia, or the Kingdom of France, so I don't see why a little creative freedom can't be taken. Hell, I honestly thought the magazine/journal was one of the more probable parts of my post, in comparison to a family maintaining their wealth and power for centuries. Though, if there is a real serious problem with the format of my post, or any other part, then either of the game masters are more than free to request I change it.
